Organizing the Presidency. Stephen Hess
giving him advance notice of actions to be taken by the departments and agencies. Adams coordinated White House work through early morning staff meetings, generally three times a week. These sessions also were used for briefings by the CIA and preparation of suggested answers to questions that might be asked at presidential press conferences.
Although there had been some formalized responsibility for lobbying Congress in the Truman White House, it had been essentially a closet operation. Lobbying without acknowledging that it was being done presumably was least offensive to the legislature’s sensibilities as a coequal branch of government. From Eisenhower’s point of view, however, the best reason to end this fiction was that he wanted staff positioned between himself and all those nattering members of Congress. Like many professional military men, he had a high regard for Congress, but not for its members.23 The six aides who served at some point in the White House congressional relations office had had considerable experience on Capitol Hill; one had been a member of the House of Representatives, and three had more substantial ties to the Democratic party than to the GOP. Given that the Democrats controlled Congress for three-fourths of the time Eisenhower was in office, these relationships were not without significance. The Republican congressional leadership was wooed through weekly meetings with the president for which the staff prepared detailed agendas. Eisenhower confessed that “these Legislative meetings were sometimes tiresome.”24 But in general the program fared well because of the president’s great popularity, his personal friendships with Democratic leaders Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson, the skill of his staff, and mostly because he did not ask for a great deal. The White House conducted a major assault on Congress for a legislative objective only once or twice a year; the rest of the time the departments were on their own.
Eisenhower regarded meetings with the White House press corps, like those with members of Congress, as a necessary though less than pleasant aspect of being president. He could not and would not manipulate them in the manner of Roosevelt, but they did not irritate him to the degree that they had Truman. If he could not point to his meetings with the reporters as a positive accomplishment, he did take some pride in having survived: “I was able to avoid causing the nation a serious setback through anything I said in many hours, over eight years, of intensive questioning.… It is far better to stumble or speak guardedly than to move ahead smoothly and risk imperiling the country.”25
His press conferences averaged one every other week, down from once a week during the Truman presidency, although illness accounted for some of the decline.26 Hagerty’s press briefings doubled, however, with sessions each morning and afternoon. The press secretary also managed to coax greater mileage out of fewer presidential press conferences by releasing full transcripts within hours and by allowing them to be taped for radio and filmed for later use on television. Since Eisenhower did not grant personal interviews and since staff members generally referred reporters’ inquiries to Hagerty, the press secretary emerged for the first time as the principal spokesman for the government.
The reputation for efficiency that the White House staff had under Adams’s direction was well earned, but the reputation for organizational rigidity was overstated by contemporary observers. There was a box on the chart for speechwriter, but other staff members, notably Gabriel Hauge and Bryce Harlow, were pressed into service from time to time. Maxwell Rabb, the cabinet secretary, also handled relations with Jewish and other minority groups. Frederic Morrow was the administrative officer for special projects as well as being deeply involved in civil rights (he was the first Black professional on a White House staff). Paul Carroll and Andrew Goodpaster, both military officers, successively headed the staff secretariat while also being responsible for the day-to-day liaison on national security affairs. Although such mixed assignments were exceptions, there was some flexibility in the system to take advantage of special talents.
There was more organizational rigidity in the redesign of the White House foreign policy machinery. By 1956 the National Security Council staff consisted of twenty-eight members, of whom eleven were considered “think people.” Eisenhower was the first president to appoint a special assistant for national security affairs with responsibility for long-range planning. Day-to-day liaison with State and Defense, as has been noted, was handled by the staff secretary. Neither were operational, so that even together their duties did not add up to those later assumed by Henry Kissinger. The first assistant for national security affairs, Robert Cutler, described his domain as “the top of Policy Hill.”27 On the upside of the hill was the Planning Board (basically Truman’s NSC senior staff renamed). It was made up of departmental representatives at the assistant secretary level, with the presidential assistant as its chairman. The Planning Board developed position papers, which the presidential assistant carried up to the crest, the National Security Council. Assuming that decisions were made by the president at the summit, the decisions then went down the hill to be implemented by the departments. On the downside, Eisenhower placed a new mechanism, the Operations Coordinating Board, consisting of officers at the undersecretary level, whose job was to expedite decisions and follow them up.28
The NSC Planning Board met Tuesday and Friday afternoons for three hours. It normally took three or four meetings before a paper was ready to be sent forward. Gordon Gray, special assistant for national security affairs, cited one paper that consumed all or part of twenty-seven meetings and on which twenty-three consultants worked. After reviewing a paper, the Planning Board would return it to a group of assistants, who met for four to eight hours on each redraft. This laborious process was designed to force agreement, but despite the best efforts of the chairman of the Planning Board that was not always possible, and Gray mentioned one policy paper that was finally forwarded to the NSC with nineteen “splits.”29
The president presided over 329 of the 366 weekly NSC meetings during his two terms. These meetings were particularly useful during the first two years of the administration, when the work of the council was largely taken up with examining all the policies of the Truman administration. But the machinery kept getting more cumbersome. Meetings were attended by the five statutory members (president, vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, and director of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization); the two statutory advisers (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and director of the CIA); three officers that the president added to the NSC (secretary of the treasury, budget director, and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission); and enough regular invitees to add up to twenty persons around the cabinet table.30 In addition there were others, such as the attorney general or the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, whose presence was requested for specific agenda items. As Cutler early warned, at some point a group turns into a town meeting, and “once this invisible line is passed, people do not discuss and debate; they remain silent or talk for the record.”31
When Eisenhower met with President-elect Kennedy on December 6, 1960, he reported that “the National Security Council had become the most important weekly meeting of the government.” Yet in one of the afterthoughts in his memoirs, he suggested that part of the committee structure could be usefully replaced “by a highly competent and trusted official with a small staff … who might have a title such as Secretary for International Coordination.”32 Still, as tedious as some of Eisenhower’s NSC procedures were, there is no evidence that they caused unreasonable delay when prompt action was necessary. The decision to dispatch U.S. troops to Lebanon in 1958 did not emanate from an NSC discussion; it was considered by a smaller gathering in the president’s office after an NSC meeting. The more urgent the stakes, the less likely a decision will be the result of large, formal sessions. Indeed, as Douglas Kinnard concluded in his study of Eisenhower’s national security planning: “I saw few instances where the key decisions on strategic policy were not made by the president in small informal meetings.”33 By the end of the administration, however, the NSC apparatus was coming under heavy attack from Senator Henry Jackson’s Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, whose reports would influence Senator John Kennedy.
Much of the growth in the White House staff came in the area of foreign relations. Besides the elaborate NSC operation, the presidential establishment included new offices for psychological warfare, disarmament, foreign economic policy, food aid abroad, and the international aspects of science and atomic energy. Eisenhower also relied on his brother Milton, president of Johns Hopkins University and an expert on Latin America, who has been called his “closest and most versatile